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He may not be its biggest star, but here's why the man known as Luke Skywalker is the true centre of the Star Wars universe

This article was first published in December 2015

There’s nothing about the kid that immediately screams “saviour of the galaxy”. He’s 24, in a checked shirt and dark pullover, and spends the first few minutes of the video looking down at his feet. His line readings are equally subdued – but given the lines themselves include “I doubt if the actual security there is any greater than it was on Aquilae or Sullust, and what there is is most likely directed towards a large-scale assault”, it’d perhaps be unfair to expect him to sound like Brando in Streetcar.

But towards the end of the audition, something happens. The kid shifts forward in his seat, his eyes widen, and he starts to glow.

“How many more systems have to get blown away before you have no place to hide and are forced to fight?” he asks the 30-something actor sitting beside him. (It’s Harrison Ford, from the smash hit George Lucas film American Graffiti.)

What he’s got is conviction – but a strange, contagious kind that makes those overstuffed lines feel as urgent and real to you as they seem to be to him. Back in December 1975, Mark Hamill was nobody special – a jobbing television actor, with a few bit parts in sitcoms and soap operas under his belt. But in that moment, he became someone you could believe in.

Almost 40 years after that tape was recorded, I saw Hamill on stage in California, talking about JJ Abrams's Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens, and his long-awaited return to the role that made him. Looking a little paunchy and crumpled in a grey-blue shirt and loose leather jacket, with a Nineties news-anchor haircut, you probably wouldn’t place the now-64-year-old actor as a saviour of the galaxy either: if pushed, you might guess former Top Gear presenter. But from the reactions of the 7,500-strong crowd in the Anaheim Convention Centre who’d given up their Saturday evenings to hear him speak, you’d have to say the Force was still with him.

He reminisced about the old days, revelling in the shoestring weirdness of the original productions. While filming the scenes in the swamps of Dagobah for The Empire Strikes Back, for example, Yoda’s dialogue had been fed to him through a radio earpiece that would often pick up a local pop music station – and he recalled that during one particularly heartfelt scene, the ancient Jedi master’s croaky wisdom had been suddenly replaced by More More More, a disco song by the former adult film star Andrea True.

He also spoke about the lunch he’d shared with Lucas and Carrie Fisher in 2013 during which Lucas had broached the subject of them both returning, along with Ford, for Episode VII.

“My wife said beforehand, ‘Maybe they’re doing another film,’ and I laughed at her,” he said. “I thought he was going to ask us to do press for the 3D versions, or another box set.

Yoda's dialogue was fed to Hamill through an earpieceCredit:
Alamy/ScreenProd / Photononstop

“I was in a state of shock…I couldn’t say yes or no. But later I thought, ‘It’s not like a choice. It’s like I was drafted. Can you imagine if, for some reason, I’d said I didn’t want to do it? I’d have all of you” – he gestured to the arena – “surrounding my house like the angry villagers in a Frankenstein picture. I’d be the most hated person in fandom.”

For now, though, Hamill’s standing seems secure. There’s a genuine fondness in his relationship with Star Wars fans: take his autographs, which often come with a self-deprecating aside. (On a trading card that shows a heartbroken Luke outside the smouldering shell of Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru’s homestead, he once scribbled: “Well, now I can go to Tosche Station whenever I want.”)

A Star Wars trading card signed by Mark HamillCredit:
raggedrabbit/raggedrabbit

And while those fans know roughly what to expect from Han and Leia in Episode VII, it’s Luke, while apparently a lynchpin of the plot, that remains a mystery. The trailers have offered only one glimpse of him to date: a robotic hand resting on R2-D2’s head, while sparks from a nearby bonfire drift through the dark.

But Hamill’s very Alec Guinness-esque beard during a spell filming on the remote Irish island of Skellig Michael in July 2014 suggests that Luke may have gone into exile in much the same way as Guinness’s Obi-Wan Kenobi did in the original Star Wars film – perhaps guarding the relics of Darth Vader that the series’ latest masked villain, Adam Driver’s Kylo Ren, seems so eager to obtain. Or perhaps, as rumour has it, he’s the film’s bad guy in chief.

There’s no question that Hamill still matters – both to Star Wars and its fans. But I’ve resisted calling him a movie star because, after seeing him that night, even with the entire arena cheering him on, I’m not entirely sure he is one.

In 1981, shortly after the release of The Empire Strikes Back, People magazine quoted the actor as saying the Star Wars films had turned him into "an icon, like Mickey Mouse – and though the piece made no mention of his tone, it seems unlikely to have been untrammelled glee.”

Not that there’s anything wrong with Mickey Mouse: in fact, the cartoon character was a welcome note of constancy in Hamill’s otherwise unsettled childhood. His father was a captain in the U.S. Navy, which meant he and his six siblings (Hamill was the fourth of seven children) grew up between California, Virginia, New York and Yokohama and Yokosuka in Japan.

Watching The Mickey Mouse Club after school with his brothers and sisters was a favourite activity – as was losing himself in the colour funnies that came with his father’s Sunday newspaper. Before he could read, he’d pore over silent strips like Henry and The Little King, while the black-and-white Adventures of Superman TV series, starring George Reeves, introduced him to the pleasures of superheroism. (He remains a keen comic-book reader and collector: as for the Disney connection, he named his firstborn son Nathan Elias after the famous Walter Elias, AKA Walt.)

As a child, he harboured dreams of cartooning but the drama club at his English-speaking high school in Yokosuka made him think again. When he was 17, his family returned to California, and he moved to the city, studying drama at Los Angeles City College and renting a place of his own (a garden shed, for $55 a month).

Mark Hamill in Star Wars: A New HopeCredit:
Alamy/ScreenProd/Photononstop

One of his first acting jobs was at a Renaissance Faire, performing six skits a day, arresting Robin Hood one minute and being cured of a broken leg by St. Peter’s magic bone the next. The pay was $8 a day, though it was docked if you dropped character and broke the spell.

He was blond, chipper and good-looking in an earnest kind of way: obviously, network television beckoned. His first bit-part was on The Bill Cosby Show in 1970, playing a member of a high-school poetry club, while his first regular gig came two years later, as a lovestruck teen on the ABC soap opera General Hospital.

Others soon followed: a voice in the Saturday morning cartoon Jeannie, a lead role in the short-lived sitcom The Texas Wheelers. He also provided the voice of Sean, the diminutive “leader of the Knights of Stardust”, in Ralph Bakshi’s delirious counterculture fantasy animation, Wizards, and would later reminisce about the notoriously gruff Bakshi grunting at him in the recording booth: “You call that a f_____’ pixie?”

It was in 1975 that Hamill’s friend Robert Englund – who would go on to play the dream-stalking serial killer Freddie Krueger in Nightmare on Elm Street – who tipped him off about a promising-sounding audition. Two hot young directors, George Lucas and Brian De Palma, were holding a joint casting call at Goldwyn Studios in Hollywood. Lucas was looking for new faces for a long-gestating sci-fi fantasy adventure, that was then-titled The Star Wars: From the Adventures of Luke Starkiller.

Ford had agreed to read the part of Han Solo, a galactic freebooter, as a favour to his old director, and in a 1976 interview, given before Star Wars was released, Hamill remembered overhearing Ford saying to the man the young actor had been politely calling Mr Lucas: “Aw s___ George, let’s get this f_____’ thing over with and get the hell outta here.”

Before that day, Lucas had intended to give the part of Luke to William Katt, another bright-eyed, blond, young TV actor. But as the audition tape attests, Hamill was the New Hope the director had been searching for. Katt, meanwhile, got the not-insignificant consolation prize of playing Tommy Ross, the pig-blood-slathered prom date of one Carrie White in De Palma’s own next film.

Star Wars changed everything – almost, if not quite, in a heartbeat. On the day the film opened, Lucas called Hamill and asked if he felt famous yet: when he said no, Lucas said in that case he should come to the studio and re-record some dialogue for the monaural prints (the original release was mixed in stereo). On their way home, they drove past Grauman’s Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard, and noticed the line for Star Wars ran around the block. “I wanted to lean out the window,” he told Gossip magazine in 1978, “and say, ‘Why are you here? Why did you do this?’”

At the time, Hamill thought Star Wars might be as big as Goldfinger, which made almost $125 million in the U.S. In the event, it made $307 million, and played for almost a year. Even before adjusting for inflation and adding the reissues and Special Edition, it remains the seventh most successful film ever released.

It’s strange and not a little eerie to think that Star Wars was almost Hamill’s final film as well as his first. On January 11, 1977, a little over five months before the film’s release, Hamill was driving his new BMW along a freeway in Southern California, fast – while listening to Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, of all things. He realised he was about to miss his exit, and swerved, hard, across four lanes in an attempt to reach it.

The car flipped onto its side and rolled off-road. Hamill broke his nose and both cheekbones. The face that cinema-goers around the world were about to get to know – was gone. “I just woke up and I was in the hospital, and I knew that I had hurt myself very, very badly,” he said in 1978. “And then someone held a mirror up to my face, and I just felt that my career was over.”

Surgeons were able to repair much of the damage, using cartilage from his ear to rebuild his nose. But the difference between his appearance in Star Wars and in the teen comedy Corvette Summer, which he made six months after the accident, is apparent – as it is in the 1978 Star Wars Holiday Special, a universally reviled made-for-TV variety show, in which he appears, very obviously, under a thick coat of make-up and on heavy painkillers.

Hamill has rarely spoken about the crash, other than to acknowledge it happened, and that his dramatic facial scarring at the opening of The Empire Strikes Back – after his mauling on the ice-blown wastes of Hoth by a hungry wampa – was only partly artificial.

In May 1981, a year after the release of The Empire Strikes Back, he relocated to New York with his wife, Marilou York, a dental hygienist he’d met between making the two Star Wars films, and their son. His plan was to broaden his range, do a little theatre, before returning to Elstree Studios in early 1982 to shoot Return of the Jedi.

Mark Hamill in the 1980 war movie The Big Red OneCredit:
Copyright (c) 1980 Rex Features. No use without permission./Moviestore/REX Shutterstock/Copyright (c) 1980 Rex Features. No use without permission./Moviestore/REX Shutterstock

And he had a juicy Broadway debut lined up: the lead role in Bernard Pomerance’s heart-rending melodrama The Elephant Man. But the show, which had then been running for over two years, closed wihin three weeks of his debut, before even the official opening night. No doubt that slump was quickened by an advertising campaign – Hamill in his Luke Skywalker costume, with the tagline “And the Force continues…on Broadway!” – that might kindly be described as poorly targeted.

A second assault – taking over the title role in Amadeus from Tim Curry, for a nine-month run in 1983 – was significantly more successful, and Hamill spent most of the remainder of the 1980s on stage. Occasionally he dipped back into film, although the films rarely merited the effort. (An exception – arguably the exception – is The Big Red One, a war movie he made in 1980 with Samuel Fuller, between Star Wars and Empire.)

You might think his role in Amadeus would have stood him in perfect stead for Miloš Forman’s 1984 film adaptation of that play. But apparently a fretful executive producer told Forman and his casting directors: “I don’t want Luke Skywalker in this film.”

And that, more or less, has been Hollywood’s mantra ever since. What’s so cheering about Hamill, though, is he hasn’t let it stop him. His love of comics helped win him a role in the acclaimed Batman: The Animated Series in 1993, first as a supporting villain in a Mr. Freeze episode, and then as the Joker, another role in which he replaced Tim Curry. Warner Bros. Animation were so impressed by Hamill’s reading of the character – “I saw the laugh as a musical instrument,” he once told an interviewer, “that it had colours depending on his mood” – that they had him re-record all seven of the episodes Curry had already completed.

Until he was in the booth, Hamill was convinced the job was too good to be true. “Because of my background, because of playing Luke,” he had already concluded, “there was no way I was going to get this part.” But away from the cinema, he’s since become the go-to-guy. That flesh-creeping cackle in the recent, million-selling Batman: Arkham Asylum, City and Knight video games? That’s him.

A slew of voice-acting work followed, and more recently, higher-profile live-action roles too, many of which trade on his pop-culture cachet. He was a climate change professor in Matthew Vaughn’s Kingsman, a lightsaber-wielding bad guy called Cocknocker in Kevin Smith’s Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, and popped up in the current superhero series The Flash as The Trickster, a villain he’d previously played in the 1990 Flash live-action show and the 2000s Justice League cartoon. (The writers even gave him an “I am your father” line, for old time’s sake.)

For him, however, Episode VII is filmmaking on another scale. It’s easy to forget that the original Star Wars trilogy were seat-of-the-pants productions: Hamill once (very generously) compared the gulf between them and Lucas’s more recent prequels to that between “a garage band” and “a philharmonic”. Under the sprightly baton of JJ Abrams, he’s finally sitting with the orchestra.